concepts

Above & beyond language

[more coming soon] Language & task demands How does language contribute to the human ability to quickly adapt to novel tasks demands? Is it thanks to higher order semantic representations, grounded in sensorimotor information, that bypass idiosyncratic lower-level aspects? Performing task-appropriate behaviors requires (at a minimum) three stages: linguistic processing, semantic understanding, and sensorimotor implementation of the instructions received. Thus, it should be possible to track the corresponding spatiotemporal shift in representational content across cortical areas: from low level linguistic features to high-level semantics and sensorimotor control signals.

December 21, 2021 Read

Concepts across languages & cultures

Conceptual spaces and semantic typology [more coming soon]

December 20, 2021 Read

Concepts & words across people

Ontogeny and phylogeny of individual differences [more coming soon]

December 19, 2021 Read

Learning words & concepts

Our exploration of the dynamics between language and semantic, labels and concepts, includes the study of how the association between words and their meaning is built, as well as how developmet (and issues during development) affects that association. Learning novel concepts Vigano, S., Borghesani, V., & Piazza, M. (2021) Symbolic categorization of novel multisensory stimuli in the human brain. NeuroImage, p.118016. We used fMRI to study how the brain categorizes multisensory objects using words.

December 18, 2021 Read

Losing words & concepts

We investigate which neural substrate are critical for language and semantic processing. So far we have focused on: the role played by the left and right anterior temporal lobe (ATL) in, respectively, verbal and nonverbal semantic (Borghesani et al., Cortex, 2019; Borghesani et al., NeuroImage:Clinical, 2020; Borghesani et al., Aphasiology, 2019) how ATL damage can be (partially) compensated by the over recruitment of spared dorsal and posterior areas (Borghesani et al.

December 17, 2021 Read

Representing words & concepts

We study the neuro-cognitive correlates of semantic knowledge (Borghesani & Piazza, Neuropsychologia, 2017). So far, we have seen how different concept features are encoded in distributed yet specialized cortical representations, with crucial topographical dissociations describing a posterior-to-anterior gradient from perceptual to conceptual features (Borghesani et al., Neuroimage, 2016) are automatically and rapidly retrieved when presented with symbolic information (Borghesani et al., JoCN, 2018) according to the task the subject is performing (Borghesani et al.

December 16, 2021 Read